The Billionaire's Assistant

Chapter 61

Kat lifted a hand to her temple, still attempting to recover from the intensity of Jove's attention.

"What?" she asked blearily, as if just woken from sleep.

"The speech?" Jove reminded.

Kat nodded slowly. "What about it?"

Jove smiled. "We need to finish it," he said slowly, overenunciating the words.

Kat blinked slowly. "Well, why are we here then?" she asked, coming back to herself. "Why aren't we working on it now?"

Jove laughed, his mirthful, contagious laugh, and Kat joined in despite herself.

"You wanted to come here," he pointed out. "You specifically said you wanted to come here. That's why we're here."

"Well," said Kat, still laughing as she shrugged. "You shouldn't have said yes."

"I'm always gonna say yes to you," Jove answered, pulling his pocket from his cellphone. "I'll have someone swing by the office and bring my laptop, we can work here." He looked up, his thumbs pausing mid text. "Cool with you?"

Kat nodded and he finished tapping out the text then set his phone on the table face down.

"What do we do till it gets here?" he asked conspiratorially. "I'm not eating anymore of that sandwich."

"It's good!" Kat protested.

"It very much is not," Jove said informatively. "But I'm glad you're happy."

She rolled her eyes again, taking another bite.

"Look at the menu then," she challenged after swallowing. "Go get something else."

"Will it have warm hummus on it?" Jove grumbled as he slid out of the booth.

When the laptop was finally delivered, both Kat's mushroom panni and Jove's alternatively selected ham and swiss croissant reduced to crumbs, they had been talking for hours, their usual playful banter that was always undercut by forays into deceptively murky depths. Their conversational path meandered and wound from the impersonal to the very essence of themselves without so much as a trail marker as warning.

"Was that David?" Kat whispered as yet another suited man walked away from them, the laptop now between them.

Jove shook his head. "David's cool, you'll like David."

Kat smiled, a fleeting sprinkling of pleasure at the idea that Jove found it a foregone conclusion that they'd continued spending enough time together for her to meet the people in his life. Her smile melted into a frown as she remembered her conversation with Andy, the way she'd felt as Andy's eyes searched her face for the truth.

She wouldn't meet David, she didn't want to. She didn't want anything to do with Jove's life, didn't want to care the way she did. She sighed, pushing the laptop towards him.

"Password?"

He flipped it open, typed in the code, and spun it back towards her, the cursor blinking on the spot they'd left off at in his office hours before.

Kat suddenly felt inexplicably exhausted, felt as if she'd been awake for days, working on this speech, against herself, for so long she could hardly hold her head up. She was shocked to find tears pushing abruptly and urgently against the back of her eyes, her face growing hot.

This pressure was becoming too much, it was beginning to impact her in ways she didn't realize. Ways that manifest like this. She didn't want to learn anything else about Jove, couldn't stand to, and she felt as if she couldn't go on with her facade for another minute. She couldn't respond to him the way she wanted to, she couldn't say what she felt, couldn't act how she was drawn to. She couldn't feel what she felt, and those repressed emotions were spilling out at odd times, making her want to cry after spending hours chatting with Jove pleasantly. She lifted her hands to the keyboard, her limbs feeling heavy and ungainly.

She sighed, feeling as if the exaggerated exhale required the reminder of her effort.

"Let's start with more business stuff?" she said weakly, hoping to steer him away from the personal. "What do you." She blinked, squeezing her eyes shut for a movement longer than she should've. "What do you think about," she began again. "What's your business philosophy?"

Jove looked concerned. "You ok?" he asked cautiously.

"I'm fine," Kat said quickly. "Tired."

"Oh, we don't have to do this now," Jove offered quickly, pushing back his empty plate. "We can go back to the office, or, or I could just take you home if you wanted, whatever you want."

She looked at him, surprised into silence by the undisguised eagerness in his voice. They stared at each other for several long beats, eyes speaking the words their mouths couldn't and wouldn't form.

Every time they looked at each other like this, every time they had entire conversations with their gaze, arguments with their glances, offered admissions with their eye contact, Kat felt as if she were falling upward, feeling the backwardness and the wrongness of air rushing the wrong way, pushing against her back as the ground raced away from her, ever lower, ever in the wrong direction. The inversion of the familiar. Recognizable, but invariably skewed.

I know him, Kat found herself thinking nonsensically, idiotically. hopefully. I know him and he knows me.

"I don't want you to be tired," he said sheepishly, acknowledging the uncharacteristic break in his suave demeanor.

She smiled at him, her heart buzzing hotly in her chest.

"I think I'll be ok," she said quietly.